by Ingvar Thor Gylfason, LS Retail Developer With an established Facebook Page, a growing userbase and a content distributing strategy in place, it is time to dig deep. It is time to get to know your users, optimize your content and set goals. It is time to introduce Facebook Insights.
What is Facebook Insights?
Almost all social media strategists have questions like: "Is my Facebook Page successful? What type of users are engaging with our content? What content is working and what is not?“. Facebook Insights is a tool that will help answering these questions. It is in fact a dashboard with metrics around the content on a Facebook Page. When marketing businesses or brands on Facebook, it is important to understand trends in user growth, demographics, engagement with content and the list of metrics goes on. Facebook Insights is invaluable in obtaining a deep understanding of your userbase and therefore a very important tool for businesses that want to succeed on the Facebook platform.
Facebook Insights offers features like:
- Benchmarking
- Best post types
- Comparison to general Facebook audience
- Advanced filtering
- Post click statistics
And many more.
Get your users engaged!
The concept of an engaged user has confused many social media experts and many have incorrectly assumed that it means anyone who likes, comments on or shares a post. That is not the case as engaged users are also those who only click on a post to view its contents. Facebook breaks engagement down to clicks, comments, likes and shares for each post, so it is simple to see how your users are actually engaging and if they connect with the content that you are sharing.
Benchmarking
One of the greatest features that Facebook Insights offers is Benchmarking. With it, it is easy to compare the performance of your page between different time periods and see when your page has the highest user engagement rate. Not only that, but also understand what type of content has attracted the attention of your followers the most. It goes without saying that it is very important to choose the right post to share at the right time. Users can be more excited about a certain type of content during some period of the year or the day even. The amount of data Facebook gives you access to is substantial and not only related to positive reactions from your users. The amount of unlikes or if users hide your posts can give you a clear indication of what is the wrong content in the eyes of your users and looking into those statistics can spare page admins from making repeated mistakes. There is a big difference between content that is not good and content that is just plain wrong.
Concept consumption
The ability to drill-down to each post has been enhanced as you can now select different Reach and Engagement metrics that include Organic Vs. Paid and Non-Fans Vs. Fans. Being able to determine the engagement and reach of each post in such detail gives social-media experts a great tool to measure the success of advertisements and campaigns. Another important feature is the ability to see when your fans are online. By knowing when your followers are actually online it is now possible to minimize the risk of your posts to go unnoticed by maximazing expoure. The graph, however, covers the most recent week only and is not related to any content you post. Finally the people tab shows demographics data like age, gender and location of those that like your page and are reached and engaged with the content you post. With it, it's possible to monitor that the users that are reached by your content are actually people that fit your marketing criteria and could, therefore, be converted into paying customers.